I wasn’t sure if crowdsourcing was used in education, and how? I was only familiar with crowdsourcing as a means to fund innovative startups. But after listening to Dr. Cope discussing collective intelligence, and actually exemplifying crowdsourcing in education I set to research it a bit more.

Surprisingly, I found that crowdsouring for education has its own definition, as following: “Crowdsourcing for education (CfE) is a type of (a) online activity in which (b) an educator, or an educational organization (c) proposes to a group of individuals via a flexible open call (d) to directly help learning or teaching.” (Jiang et al, 2018). Among the many examples the authors evidence to support their study, the following are noteworthy:

1. creating educational contents: textbooks, assessment material and annotation of learning materials, or even using crowdsourcing to build a platform that served as home of the educational content;
2. practical experience for learners: collect learning-relevant crowdsourcing tasks and use these tasks to offer ”real-world educational activities for learners” (ibid.), like Quasi-Crowdsourcing Test (QCT) conducted by Nanjing University;
3. exchanging complementary knowledge: the learners get support from crowds online, and as Dr. Cope mentioned the crowds are smarter than each of the individual selves. Stack Overflow crowdsources coding problems and solutions, and Xpress crowdsources everyday colloquial expressions for second language learners
4. augment abundant feedbacks for learners with crowdsourcing: peer-to-peer assessments in large cohorts where the teacher cannot assess all students are crowdsources, for example CrowdGrader, an educational platform organized by UC Santa Cruz researchers crowdsources homework assessment, reviews and grades and the class has managed to reach many hundreds of students (de Alfaro and Shavlovsky, 2014).

While I personally haven’t used crowdsourcing in education, I will be certain to remember this form of collective intelligence, and the potential to solve otherwise impossible problems. While I personally haven’t used crowdsourcing in education, I will be certain to remember this form of collective intelligence, and the potential to solve otherwise impossible problems. 

Finally, I would like to end by sharing how crowdsourcing can improve access to higher education for disadvantaged children today, a powerfull TEDx session I would like to encourage you to view: